Do 200 situps

So I finished Week 3 successfully, although that was certainly the week that started to challenge me.

Unfortunately, reaching that level of exercise seems to have caused something of a relapse for me health-wise, not something I am happy about as I spent all of 2008 too sick to work or do almost anything else.

So I’m taking a break from the situps for a week or so, and will go back to Week 1 or Week 2 for a while to keep up some activity while not running myself into the ground.

This is really disappointing for me, but I have to think long-term and not cling to unrealistic short-term goals.

Week 2 was closer to the right level for me – my final sets were 50, 40 and 40 situps (minimum 22/26/30), so the curve is catching up with me.

Doing the exhaustion test for the end of Week 2 I got either 76 or 86 situps – I had trouble keeping count – which wasn’t as much of an improvement as I would have liked, but maybe that’s not surprising given that the daily sets weren’t too challenging. That still puts me in the highest column for Week 3, where I suspect that things might get interesting.

I’m dubious about whether the end of Week 6 will see me able to complete 200 situps, but we’ll see.

Well, I chickened out of starting at Week 3 of the program, because I thought my good-ish performance on the initial test was probably a fluke. Glad I did, because Week 1 has been very manageable but jumping straight into a really strenuous program would probably have been a really bad idea.

No real problems with Week 1 column 3; I’m well ahead of the curve as far as the final set of sit-ups goes (29/33/40, where the minimum is 14/18/20). Bring on Week 2!

Did the initial sit-ups test this morning and got 60 consecutive sit-ups, which (somewhat alarmingly) puts me just in the “very good” category. This means the site suggests I start on Week Three of the program, which I will do (with some trepidation) in two days’ time.